


They've Gone So Far To Find The Truth (they're never coming home)

by gala_apples



Category: Captain America (Movies), Criminal Minds, Grimm (TV), Leverage, Punisher (Comics), Warehouse 13
Genre: Background Relationships, Crossover, Gen, Plans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 07:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1543280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five reactions to the flood of information post Captain America: Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They've Gone So Far To Find The Truth (they're never coming home)

**Author's Note:**

> I had to use the Punisher tag already in the system, which has comics brackets. But the section is actually for movie!Punisher, because it's fantastically brutal.
> 
> The title is a System of A Down lyric.

Hardison shouldn’t be looking at this right now. It’s not that his girlfriend and boyfriend will get mad at him. Parker and Eliot both understand why he might be too occupied come to bed. Hardison understands the same about them, for that matter. They all have their quirks, their obsessions. But they’re not lone wolves anymore, and that generally means if the bed only holds two when someone gets up to pee, a quick jog through the mansion to find the missing body will be next on the agenda. Not to stop anyone from tending to the organic garden at four in the morning, that sort of normalcy policing works well for exactly none of them. It’s a reassurance thing in a good light, or a nosy information hoarding thing in a bad one.

So the truth is, if Hardison doesn’t want Parker and Eliot to know what he’s doing -and he’s not sure if he does- he should be working this spreadsheet during the day. They’d just assume he was playing a game. But Hardison hasn’t been able to stop thinking since it leaked. He’s got at least fifty tabs open, an extension helping him colour code them by usefulness. It’s the sort of fixation that draws you back out from under the blankets after both your lovers have passed out from exuberant sex.

As it stands, he’s not surprised when an Eliot shaped shadow suddenly blocks half the screen’s glow. It was a matter of when, not if. “Find a client?”

“The website’s not up.” Christ. It should be literally impossible for Parker to not have a shadow, but she’s somehow always a surprise. His back pops when he startles, he’s been hunched over the screen for hours.

“Maybe he’s on step two,” Eliot says gruffly.

Parker shakes her head. “Step two is face to face meetings.”

“There’s gotta be a step between reading every bitch and complain on the form, and sitting down at the pub.”

“Fine, whatever.” Parker dismisses the argument and pokes Hardison’s shoulderblade. “Find a client?”

Hardison pinches his brows. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about, man. We’ve got some crazy low hanging fruit, here. A friggin’ cornucopia. So do we destroy the people who definitely deserve it, but no one’s technically complained, or do we stick to the routine?”

Maybe Eliot’s skim read the forum that’s the current open tab, or maybe he’s just a good speaker of Hardisonese. Either way, he guesses right. “You mean the agency that toppled because it was full of neo-Nazis, right? I hate that shit.”

“You’d have to be insane not to. But is it _us_?” 

Hardison twists easily on leather seat to look at them. He really wants their opinions, and that includes what little body language they give away. He’s already got more plans than there are letters of the English alphabet for doing what they do, but if Parker and Eliot hadn’t come to find him, he might not have brought them up. Hydra’s bad, as bad as anything they’ve seen, but Leverage’s bottom line is helping those with nowhere else to turn. This is a lot more big picture than stopping corrupt lawyers or reclaiming a stolen organ transplant, or even that one time they overthrew a dictatorship and installed a proper president.

Parker frowns, a hint of her old society-is-confusing expression on her face. Hardison wonders for a minute if he should back up and explain everything. He’s never quite sure how much attention Parker pays to the news. There’s a reason, post-Nate, that he’s the one that handles finding nearly all of their clients. Before he can figure out how to summarize the shit show that is Avengers’ SHIELD backers being full of Hydra moles, Parker asks a different question. “Will they have to pay if we don’t take care of it?”

“I dunno. Mostly? It’s hard to imagine that most of these people won’t go down, eventually. Legally. They’ve already bagged a Senator.”

“We’ll wait six months and go after the stragglers.”

Hardison tugs on Parker’s arm, tentative as he always is about forcing things on his lovers. She bends, deciding to go with the movement. After a kiss he tells Parker that’s why she’s the brains of the operation, and he means it. Right now they could drown in the amount of planning he’s got sketched out. Half a year from now, three quarters of these assholes might be in jail.

***

“Don’t think I’m complaining, because I’m really not,” Claudia starts. 

Artie scowls at her anyway, like she’s been complaining for ten minutes straight. So, basic typical Artie then. Whatever, Claudia won’t let grumpy-guts stop her from asking.

“But why go now?” It just doesn’t make sense to her. “We didn’t go after the Chitauri.”

His face isn’t aimed at her, it’s half in his big doctor’s purse thingy. That doesn’t stop Claudia from feeling the eyeroll radiating at her. “Alien weaponry are not artifacts.”

“We didn’t go check out a bunch of stuff that’s showing up on the weird radar. Stuff that’s definitely weird-like-us weird.”

“Innovative technology and an uprise in abilities does not necessarily an artifact make.”

“We didn’t even go get the blue box!” It’s possible that the Warehouse isn’t supposed to know about that, but, well, tough noogies. If SHIELD cared so much about their secrets they shouldn’t have made their network so easily hackable. At least the lower levels. Tony Stark’s probably gotten further in, but then he also probably cares more. Her life is about hucking purple goo at stuff, not wearing a robot suit to kill bad guys.

“The Tesseract is Asgard’s domain.”

“So why now,” Claudia repeats.

Artie pulls off his glasses and holds them up to peer through the lenses. Since it does the exact same thing as wearing them with the bonus negative of tying up one hand, Claudia’s not sure why, but whatever floats the old dude’s boat. “Because there’s no way Hydra got this far into an operation nearly as covert as our own without using an artifact of some influence. You and Steve are tasked with figuring out what that was.”

Claudia leaves with Jinsky without much more protest. She’s happy to go on yet another roadtrip; nothing wrong with spending half her twenties in a car. Especially since it’s Steve, who is not-so-secretly her fave. Pete farts in the car way more than is acceptable, she’s not sure how Myka stands it. On the other hand Myka is obnoxious about taking the quickest route to any given artifact, never mind if the world’s biggest ball of string is only a half an hour side trip. And alone time with her bestie isn’t the only perk. Maybe she’ll get to meet an Avenger if they play their cards right. Her favourite is actually Hawkeye, but as far as they could read between the lines, only Captain America and Black Widow were involved in this operation. 

Part of her does wonder though, if they’re going to find anything. Artie has a distrust of- well, of everything, honestly. But his Jewish heritage and his time as Arthur Weisfelt, NSA agent being forced to double cross his own government to get political prisoners out of Soviet gulags, make him particularly distrustful of a Nazi inspired regime uncovered by a Russian spy. It’s possible he’s seeing more here than there really is.

Oh well. If that’s true, Claudia will make Steve break the news. Steve’s better at that sort of thing.

***

Frank doesn’t find out about it online. He’s not sure he’s even been online since the massacre. He didn’t just change outfits and move out his home . He dropped everything that would remind him of his family and better days. Just like he hasn’t eaten french toast or listened to REM, he’s not about to search out blogs the way Maria Elizabeth once did. Swearing your life to vengeance and bloody fiery protection is easier when you’re not tied down.

No, he hears about those sick Nazi fucks from the peice of shit patrons surrounding him. Because they are, of course they are. A dive bar like this only accepts pieces of shit, or is it that like cream rising to the top, any halfway decent person gets the fuck out while the getting’s good, leaving everyone else to fester? Either or, it’s all semantics to a guy like Frank.

The only thing that distinguishes the two guys to his left from the one on his right and any number of people behind him spitting in illegal ashtrays and scratching the green felt because because they’re too drunk to aim for solids or stripes, is what they’re talking about. Frank was strongly considering getting into it with them; the ogling of the bartender and her rack is getting on his nerves. Ogling isn’t rape, he doesn’t have to hang them upside-down courtesy of their balls and a meathook, but a broken nose or two couldn’t hurt the situation.

Except now he’s got higher goals. If what Belcher and Asscrack are saying is true, that reformed war profiteer’s parents were murdered. Belcher is laughing about it, saying if Stark wasn’t left alone at like fourteen to do whatever the fuck he wanted he might not have made all those great bombs he did. Kaboom kaboom, Asscrack chimes in, flicking his fingers explosively with what nerve sensation the chronic alcohol poisoning hasn’t killed yet. Then Belcher says something about maybe Stark’s Hydra too, maybe he killed his parents because he wanted the family fortune. Frank can’t think of a more fucking stupid comment, but why the fuck is he surprised? Since when have waste of skin drunks ever made sense?

Frank pays his tab and slides off the cracked leather stool. The slaughter of parents hits close to home. But he can make this right. With bullets and machetes and flame he can make this right.

***

Penelope smooths down her skirt before she exits her office. It’s yellow with a subtle beige plaid, and she loved it when she bought it, but there’s always a moment of _I don’t fit in this drab office_. It’ll fade, because who honestly wants to wear black all the time, but but that doesn’t mean she can’t primp for best effect before meeting her team.

Whenever she sets up the case she has a moment of wanting to morbidly laugh. She’s never going to give in because half the table would assume horrible things, it’s their nature, but she can’t help the urge being there. Part of her job is making a PowerPoint of death, and how many teenagers putting purple Comic Sans on a black background and lifting stock photos from Getty Images imagine they’ll end up here?

“What have we got,” Blake asks, stylus poised over her tablet. Penelope rarely sees her without either a book or a pen. Makes sense, since she comes at everything with a linguist's background.

Penelope clicks on the pictures. “In Duluth Minnesota four bodies have been found- ick, skinned, and- double ick, Hail Hydra carved into their chests.”

“Counter terrorism didn’t want this?”

“With SHIELD dissolving their caseloads have quadrupled. They said since it’s the work of one person it’s a serial killer, and our problem.”

“Do we even know it’s Hydra? From what I’ve read they’re more subtle.” And knowing Reid’s skill set he’s probably read everything on the leaks website. Or one of the mirrors, at least. It keeps going down briefly as a branch of some country’s government thinks better of their agents and secrets being revealed, and then someone or someones -internet opinion tied between Tony Stark and Anonymous- gets it cloned and back up.

“Does it matter? We’ve seen copycats before, and they’re no less dangerous.”

“It could be a delusion, someone believing that their friends and neighbours are secretly agents. A vigilante with a sarcastic message,” Rossi opines.

Morgan shakes his head. “They had to know this would happen, releasing all this information.”

“So, what? Not telling anyone would have been better?” Penelope snaps. It sounds ruder than she meant to be, but she doesn’t take it back. She’s a hacker at heart, she believes in freedom of information. Even when it turns ugly like this.

***

“Look man, we gotta talk.”

Nick gestures to the hockey game. “I thought the point of tonight was no best man-groom talk.”

“No, not about that. Officially. We need to talk in your official capacity.”

“Which one,” Nick jokes.

“Both maybe,” Monroe replies no hint of a smile. “This Hydra thing.”

“What, you think Wesen are in it?” Nick chases the thought with a swig of beer. And here he was thinking finally one thing that wouldn’t be his problem.

“Uh, probably not? Not a lot of Wesen pushing for human ultra-supremacy. But did you think about the coins?”

“What?”

“Come on man, the coins of Zakynthos. We know they make people crave power and control. We know they let people gain charismatic influence over others. We know that Hydra was a spin off group of Nazis, and freakin’ Hitler had the coins for a while. And we know that they made at least ten, and that the English only seized three.”

“My mother destroyed those,” Nick protests. It’s weak, and he knows it.

So does Monroe. “Yeah, she destroyed three of ten. If it was ten. Come on, how do you think so many people worked their way into the top layers of SHIELD, the most paranoid government agency ever, without having a hand up over the competition?”

“So you think that Pierce or whatever his name was-” Nick doesn’t watch the news at home, but it’s impossible to spend any time in the cop shop without hearing about it. He’s pretty damn sure the top mole agent was named Pierce. “you think he had a coin?”

“I think you should keep your mind open. I think you might have to talk to your mom about them being back in play. I think you should actually watch CNN when they arrest some of the higher ups involved, and make sure they haven’t attached one to their lapel the way Hitler did,” Monroe replies.

"Great," Nick sighs. "When did the world get so complicated?"

"It's always been complicated. It's just a matter of being in the know, now."


End file.
